So, I have branched out a bit on the hobby front.
A couple of decades ago, I took a full ham license, somewhat after the fact. The unit I was with back then did a group buy of Icom AT2 when they where phased out, of which I bought two for service use. Many of us saw it as somewhat wasteful to just have access to the whatever frequencies the G6 would dash out occasionally, so we came together and organized a ham radio course.
By some happenstance, I managed to get through it, not being especially interested in the technical bits, with Ohms law and all that tosh. I wanted to use not build, and I never was much into the math side of things anyhow. So had the Icoms, bought a Icom 703 HF and a Buddipole antenna system and then swiftly ended up with two kids, and doing either 65 hours or 6 days of the week in the woods type of job, and work brought its own comms systems so no need for mine. So had the gear in a suitcase, lent out the antenna system to a commo guy in yet another unit and quickly forgot the whole thing. Come covid, the 703 went out the door to fund some camera gear, the Buddipole was lost in the fog of time and one AT was sold off years ago, the other one I havent managed to find, but I did buy a Wouxun HT some years ago, which I never got under the skin of.
Come earlier this year, I elbowed myself into a comms course to get some insight into new systems and such stuff, and there is the fellow that lent the Buddipole instructing.
So, doing this and that, I got some inspiration going, as well as getting a cash replacement for the Buddipole, that was broken down in parts, and gone with the wind in the 14 years it have been on loan.
So somewhat freshly funded, I got cracking collecting the parts for a small and portable radio shack again and picked up a second hand Yaesu 818ND QRP HF rig with an antenna tuner and sundries, a Komunica HF-PRO-2-PLUS-T multiband antenna with a tripod mounting kit, as well as an Any-Tone 878UVII VHF/UHF DMR HT radio.
The latter is a barebones china radio, but I get some reuse of accessories I already had laying about from the Wouxun and it was cheap and by all reviews, rather cheerful. Finally managed to find and get a power supply this week, so I am more or less all set to do a mount-up and get on the air. Need to score some sort of extra batteries and/or larger batteries for the Yaesu so that I can take it into the woods with a bit more operating time than an hour, but I can probably get on the air from home as it stands.
I`ll see how it fares this time around, main lifting is done, with one exception, and that is a proper home station, iow a 100 W HF. I have some feelers out for a Icom 718, a basic and cheap beginners rig that if I am really lucky, I may be able to sign out a set of.
I would like to get or build a couple of dipole antennas for running NVIS, one for home and one for portable use. Also a regular multiband Dipole for home and then I am all set to dive into the Ham radio hobby, then only other outlay on that would be a VHF/UHF DMR for car mounting but I am not too keen or in need of that. I fancy giving morse code/CW a crack but that will have to wait until next winter, and otherwise just integrate a bit of radio work when out and about.
Pictures to follow.
) photo of the two of them, taken with my tablet camera.
